Ahmedabad, 3 May 2012

Few people know how a group of Modi supporters on Twitter exposed BBC and Business Standard’s false reporting on Gujarat. Both Business Standard and BBC were compelled to change the version of their stories by midnight. BBC had to change the heading. While earlier heading was questioning Gujarat’s economic progress, the corrected heading backed Gujarat’s claims of economic progress.

It started with Business standard. Editor AK Bhattacharya in his column mixed up growth figures of Gujarat and Jharkhand and published a story puncturing Gujarat’s growth claims. Bhattacharya in his column said that Gujarat’s growth was 6% for seven years between 2004-05 and 2010-11, while Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Haryana had double digit growth in the same period. Thus the editor of Business Standard tried to show Gujarat in poor light with wrong figures.

Then Soutik Biswas from BBC joined in and bseed on a piece published in Business Standard, Soutik wrote a story on BBC questioning Gujarat’s growth story and titled it ‘Is Gujarat Red Hot Economy a Myth?’

We don’t know whether Mr. Bhattacharya and Soutik are biased against Gujarat or not, but the online world is known for keeping the record straight. The folks on Twitter went to Planning commission website and pulled out the correct figures of growth rate of Gujarat during 2004-05 and 2010-11. They challenged the Business Standard and BBC authors. Soutik Biswas, BBC correspondant in New Delhi and Ak Bhattacharya, Editor of Business Standard started receiving number of tweets on their blunder.

By midnight, Business Standard corrected the version, and mentioned in the foot note that ‘this column has been modified to incorporate corrected data.’ Emberessed BBC and Soutik Biswas too had to change the heading and correct the text. So the old heading on BBC was ‘Is Gujarat Red Hot Economy a Myth?’ And the new heading was ‘Gujarat IS a red hot economy’.

Aahha!

Corrected article of Business Standard

Original article of Business Standard

Original article on BBC

Corrected article on BBC

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